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About this blog: I am a native of Alameda County, grew up in Pleasanton and currently live in the house I grew up in that is more than 100 years old. I spent 39 years in the daily newspaper business and wrote a column for more than 25 years in add... (More)

About this blog: I am a native of Alameda County, grew up in Pleasanton and currently live in the house I grew up in that is more than 100 years old. I spent 39 years in the daily newspaper business and wrote a column for more than 25 years in addition to writing editorials for more than 15 years. I have served as a director of many non-profits in the Valley and the broader Bay Area and currently serve as chair of Teen Esteem and on the advisory board of Shepherd?s Gate. I also served as founding chair of Heart for Africa and have travelled to Africa seven times to serve on mission trips. My wife, Betty Gail, has taught at Amador Valley High (from where we both graduated) since 1981. She and I both graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, as did both of my parents and my three siblings. Given that Cal tradition, our daughter went south to the University of Southern California and graduated with a degree in international relations. Since graduation, she has taken three mission trips and will be serving in the Philippines for nine months starting in September. (Hide)

Challenging budget times at the lab

Uploaded: May 14, 2013

Tough times have returned to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The lab, which during Cold War times, enjoyed consistently growing budgets (and payroll) because its employees were doing work critical to national security. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union imploded, some elements of the core mission changed although it still centered on maintaining nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
The lab had been managed by the University of California since its founding, but thanks to truly poor management controls at its sister and the original nuclear lab in Los Alamos, NM, the management contracts for both facilities were put out to bid. UC correctly determined that it could not retain its management without private sector collaborators and ended up winning both management contracts with new partners. That shifted the culture from a non-profit university to a for-profit joint venture.
For Livermore, that resulted in substantial layoffs in the first year of the contract when the operators realized they had missed badly on the budget projections. Legal actions are still pending some those layoffs.
Fast forward to 2013 and the lab is dealing with the sequester legislation that supposedly nobody in Washington D.C. thought would take effect, but has. Instead of the across-the-board cuts, lab management has decided to sharply reduce its career workforce with an eye to the future.
Incidentally, the UC organizations are the only ones I have encountered that have a category known as "career employee"meaning that unless you screw up really badly, you will have a job until you decide to retire. In the UC days, that meant a wonderful defined benefit retirement that climbed with inflation plus medical care. For retirees, that shifted big time when the new organization dramatically altered the retirees' health care. It was clearly detrimental to retired employees and a retired employees group is still litigating that change.
Now, the lab has announced voluntary retirement program, with the incentive of up to 26 weeks of pay based upon years of service (one for one). The goal is reducing its career work force by up to 600 employees to prepare for the federal budget year 2014.
Parney Albright, the first non-home grown director, announced the plan to try and get ahead of the challenges that likely will face the lab with the new budget year starting Oct. 1. A cut of 600 employees from the 5,100 "career employees" would equal a nearly 12 percent reduction. Overall, about 6,500 people work at Livermore.
The budget challenges, which are affecting every federally funded agency, come on the heels of the lab's statement that the National Ignition Facility has not achieved fusion in 2012. The $3.5 billion laser facility has been touted as demonstrating fusion to provide limitless cheap power as well as being critical to both the understanding of basic physics and to ensure that the nuclear weapons complex is still a reliable deterrent despite being without testing since the early 1990s.
The new reality for the ignition facility as a national experimental site resulted in the lab adding a second key executive to that program who is responsible for coordinating its use with non-Livermore groups.
Like it or not, it is another new day for the lab.

Posted by cosmic-charlie,
a resident of Downtown,
on May 14, 2013 at 8:26 amcosmic-charlie is a registered user.

Don't I know it well!

Many years ago, the career employee was know as an "FTE" or Full Time Employee. And as an FTE, I was very concerned with the retirement structure and the promises made that went along with it.

At the time, with 10 years of service, I quit, out of those concerns, and found a better deal with Stanford (SLAC).

In the Stanford system, employee contributions of 10% or more, was matched in kind up to the 1st 10%, by Stanford.

This was an income reduction tax benefit, and was in real terms, a measurable entity. It was tangible, and real. Very different from some promise.

Bottom line? With 28 years of service to SLAC, my retirement began at the earliest moment to access all of the accumulated funds without early penalties.

With the promise the Lab made, my employment would had to have continued for an additional 6 1/2 years more until age 65 in order to have an equivalent stake, had I not changed jobs.

In addition, health care is a lifetime benefit thru SLAC, just as it was promised at the Lab so many years ago. The difference is, with the Lab moving into a hybrid partnership and away from the UC system, Stanford remains a private entity and BTW, is fully funded, whereas the Lab can modify any deal they want, for any reason, to maintain the bottom line. Hence big time lawsuits we are now seeing.

I maintain promises made should be kept, especially for loyal service over the long haul. If I were near retirement at the Lab, as I would soon be if not for the job change, there would be a great deal of concern about my retirement.

Remember, Lab employees historically did not contribute to Social Security (same as Federal Employees), so all of the eggs were in one basket as it were, and seemed, to this former Lab FTE, too risky to trust in a promise.